test icicles.
Title: FRANKIE SAY RELAX (SECTION B)
Rating: R
Warnings: DRUG ABUSE.
Summary: A pop quiz in seventh-year R/S, seventies nostalgia, Frank Longbottom-as-a-pimp crack. Plus diagrams.
School's out for the summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces
- Alice Cooper
Don't worry about the future, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
-Baz Luhrmann
TIMED PAPER
Examiner’s note:
While SECTION A dealt with the theoretical and the speculatory, SECTION B will tackle the precise relationships between clearly defined bodies and candidates' ability to map them.
Please note that the extracts headed ‘THE CIRCLE’ and ‘SIRIUS’ took place late on Sunday, 15 August 1976.
The extract headed ‘REMUS’ took place early in the morning of Monday, 16 August 1976.
Results will be posted once the marks gained by candidates have been processed.
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SECTION B
1) Explain FL’s allegedly increasing circumference with reference to pie.
2) RL is travelling NE/E at хmph. RL is a negligible distance away from SB. SB is completely stationary. At what point will there be a collision?
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THE CIRCLE
15-Aug-76
Remus is rolling a joint Frank is laughing with his head thrown back James is sloppily kissing Peter on the cheek who is resisting (barely) Sirius is peeling a tangerine.
The dormitory is like a collage of moving images pasted down haphazardly on the canvas of 20-20 vision; each blink reveals five scenes being acted out simultaneously. Eyelids flicker, then: Remus’s pointed tongue licking a Rizla; Frank stretching, strong arms arcing behind him in a huge semi-circle; James, using his wand to charm the cap off a bottle of Firewhisky; twin orange globes that seem to hang in mid-air as Sirius juggles the tangerines he inexplicably found under Peter’s bed. The room doesn’t just smell of weed - there is a distinct boy smell assualting everyone’s nostrils, and it’s reminiscent of bodily fluids, smoke, aftershave, crushed grass and baked bread. It’s not a pretty smell, quite strictly. But it’s comforting and familiar and almost intoxicating in itself. Everyone is talking at once and the sound washes over the room, each individual conversation as indistinguishable from the general sea of talk as each separate wave crashing onto a beach.
This is how it works.
Remus is one of the lucky ones, one of the accidental elite who managed to be labelled cool not through actually trying, more through happy accident. Remus smokes roll-ups as opposed to commercially made cigarettes because it’s cheaper - but this Knut-saving endeavour means he turned out to be the one best equipped to take on the ardous task of actually making the spliff. Frank can do it, of course, but ever the pragmatist, he’s uilitarian in his approach. Frank goes either for size or efficiency, because he figures that no matter how pretty a joint looks, it’s still only going to get smoked. Everyone else is shit at the ancient art of ‘making a zoot’ (James especially, whose infrequent attempts look like spring rolls from the dodgier Chinese takeaways).
Instead of a wand, Remus’s trusty silver lighter is used. It was discovered lying in some long grass on a third-year walk to Hogsmeade, and is the kind of lighter you pocket immediately, not even daring to look around for a possible owner. It absolutely never works before the third attempt, and has been known to stall until the attempts at ignition go into double figures.
The spliff lights. Remus tokes it, then Frank does, for considerably longer - he’s entitled. After having milked his toke for as long as decently possible, he passes it to Sirius with as much solemnity as if he’s handing over the Olympic torch.
Sirius tries to pass this flaming baton on to James immediately, but this is a foolhardy move. During a brief, vaguely homoerotic scuffle (instigated by possibly the two most staucnchly heterosexual boys in existence), James and Frank betweeen them succeed in getting the spliff between his lips. Sirius, with the resigned, pouting attitude of a toddler eating his final two sprouts, inhales, then exhales, blowing a smoke ring because he’s flash like that. James is sufficiently pleased. He claps Sirius on the back, closes his eyes and -
inhales. Notwithstanding how crap James is at the actual construction of spliff, he’s a dab hand at actually smoking it. One large breath in of acrid smoke, and then… nothing. For an irrationally long time. Peter takes the spliff from James while he sits there, chest puffed up like a robin’s. Appropriately, the scarlet Gryffindor crest is stitched above his left breast.
Peter smokes spliff in the same way he’s smoked everything the others have handed him since he was fourteeen - furtively, with much coughing, despite the fact that all he’s doing is sucking the smoke into his mouth and then choking it out. Remus takes pity and takes back the spliff, completing the circle, and a few seconds later, their leader exhales, not letting the balloons of his lungs whoosh out the smoke, but merely parting his lips and letting the grey wisps float up to the ceiling.
Each boy also has a beverage. Peter has downed most of his Firewhiskey, not having benefited from the weed (due to not actually inhaling), and, rather unwisely, James has matched him with his own bottle of Ogden’s, never one to be beaten at such an enjoyable game. Frank doesn’t drink alcohol (“It’s bad for you,” he had intoned calmly) and had sloped off to his room earlier to brew some Ginseng tea (referred to by Peter once Frank was out of earshot, as “boiled smugness”). Sirius is drinking the Firewhiskey too, of course, but at what seems to be a rather more considered pace - not that anyone can really see how much he’s drunk, due to the opaquish glass of the bottle. Remus hasn’t really had the opportunity to have too many swigs, as he’s been occupied with rolling, but he’s had first toke on the last four joints to go round the circle, and is beginning to act in a manner one might define as excessively happy.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
SIRIUS
15-Aug-76
James and Frank’s enthusiasm for getting Sirius to participate properly in the Night Before festivities had more or less petered out, and they were now having a conversation across him. Sirius didn’t mind this - he had a feeling that it was the alcohol and weed that were making him maudlin. Among other things.
“So this snake owled me a few weeks ago,” Frank began, daintily knocking ash into the china saucer which his teacup was resting in. First-year Sirius, hailing from The Noble (& Infallible) House of Black, had cottoned on slower than most to the fact that any generic Slytherin was customarily referred to in Gryffindor as a ‘snake’, this noun usually being preceded by ‘filthy’, ‘fucking’ or ‘dirty’. “Asked me if I was interested in expanding.”
“You arexpanding,” James slurred, beaming. His words kept speeding up and then reversing into each other like funfair dodgems. “Oryour waistline is. Musbee all those pastries you demolish when you get the munchies.”
“I mean expanding professionally,” Frank tranquilly replied, ignoring the dig and the sloppy pronunciation. “Wider markets. Moving away from Mary-Jane… introducing other girls into the family.”
“What girls?” James asked. It wasn’t yet clear if he fully got the metaphor, or if he really thought Frank was referring to adoptive sisters. Sirius rolled his eyes and tried to concentrate on shredding his tangerine. He was trying to do it so that the skin all came off in one long thin twist of peel, like a citrus-flavoured pencil-sharpening. But that required focus, and preferably a distinct lack of drunken best-friends in the immediate vicinity.
Instead of answering, Frank presented the spliff to Sirius, who managed to - successfully this time - deflect it onto James. James was past noticing Sirius declining to partake - past noticing anything much that wasn’t dead centre in his line of vision, and completely stationary, in fact.
“The usual suspects,” Frank said eventually. “Coco and Mandy.”
“Slags,” James said decisively.
“Coco’s pretty getting pretty big in London,” Frank said, nodding genially at Sirius, who was the only one in their immediate circle of friends who happened to live in the capital. James lived just outside it, in wholesome almost-suburbia, but it was Sirius who genuinely knew the city, who had been mugged at the tender age of nine (by a Muggle hoodie who thought his Galleons were chocolate coins and had to be subsequently rushed to a dentist), who had - due to light pollution - never actually seen the celestial body he was named after in the night sky until his first year at Hogwarts. Sirius, an authentic Londoner, was therefore expected by all of his peers to be a complete expert on all topics seedy, debauched and urban.
“Everything gets pretty big in London for a while,” Sirius volunteered. He was halfway through unwrapping his tangerine. The fist-sized ball of amber fruit peeked out if its casing, traced with white. “Then people get bored of it.”
James and Frank took a couple of seconds to digest this new piece of wisdom.
“And Lucy,” Frank finished, scratching the stubble on his chin. “Of In the Sky with Diamonds fame.”
Sirius looked across the circle at Peter and Remus. Peter was looking exceedingly grave, and Remus, ever the concerned best friend, was giving him reviving finger-snaps on the side of the head, and telling an endless stream of unanswered knock-knock jokes to take his mind off his churning stomach. Sirius considered, not for the first time, that maybe he wasn’t such a nice person. He loved Peter enormously - Pete was one of the three people he loved best in the whole fucking world, and yet he knew he could never bring himself to actually care about the fact that Pete was clearly about to have a pretty dire time upchucking his last three meals.
It wasn’t that Peter’s plight wasn’t interesting enough to hold his attention. (That being said, it had happened roughly every fortnight for the past five years, and it had been boring the first time.) The maddening thing about it was that each time Peter did throw up, he missed the white porcelain-ringed bullseye of the toilet bowl entirely, and found a new and inventive place to be sick. Some places were merely disgusting and inconvenient; for instance, the carpet or the bathtub. Others were nastier; a Quidditch boot, a shower cap, a newly-laundered pillowcase, Transfiguration coursework.
Sirius simply failed to see how anyone could muster sympathy for the perpetrator of such heinous crimes, but Remus, evidently, was in a more forgiving frame of mind. He was finding everything unaccounatably hilarious, and kept giving snuffled giggles (which he stifled by pressing his sleeve over his mouth) but he’d had enough compsure to do a self-regulated Irrigation Enchantment. A fine cooling mist sprayed out of the tip of his wand and onto Peter’s forehead. Peter seemed to be forgetting to blink, making him look both astonished and sweaty.
Then several things happened in quick succession. Remus glanced over his shoulder, and saw Sirius staring at him. At that moment, he must have tightened his grip on his wand, because the a jet of water spurted out of is end and hit Peter squarely in the eye. Peter roared with pain and started to staggering to his feet. James and Frank started ducking and dodging with gusto, both thinking that Peter was about to spew on top of them.
Sirius registered two things in the ensuing chaos - one, that Remus was no longer laughing, and that the eye-contact they had just had was hardly brief enough to be anything other than suggestive. He tugged unintentionally hard on the tangerine, agitated, and the peel tore in two. Sirius was consumed with an overwhelming sense of failure, although whether it was about Remus or the ripped tangerine twirl he didn’t know.
Remus, who had also stood up at this point, seemed to establish that Peter was indeed about to vomit, and ushered him in the direction of the bathroom with all the efficient urgency of a Healer rushing a pregnant woman into the delivery room. In a few seconds there were some horrible noises, that did actually sound a bit like something giving birth.
There was a disgusted pause, and then Frank, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened - which in fact was true, this was very much the norm - continued with his story.
“Obviously I wrote and told him where to get off,” Frank said, propping his chin up with his hand, and his elbow resting on knee. “I mean, that stuff isn’t safe. It’s not natural. Not like MJ. Just selling it’s dangerous, man.”
“How much?” James took off his glasses and commenced rubbing his face vigorously with his palms. The combined effect of drugs and alcohol was making him sleepy, Sirius could tell. “If you got into selling Lucy and Coco and stuff.”
Frank closed his eyes. James’s drowsiness was contagious.
“More than enough,” he said slowly. “Enough to pay my way through Auror training, enough to pay Alice’s training, enough to start the revolution. But it’s not worth it. What you have to understand… is that all those things… they’re part of the machine. They’re sad and angry… you take them on toiletseats before going back to the office to earn another thousand million Galleons for the Minister... you know?”
Frank seemed to be going off into a little reverie of his own, Sirius noticed. He glanced James, to see if he was also nearing unconsciousness. James, however, was clinging to lucidity, and grinned at Sirius when he caught his eye. Sirius couldn’t help but grin back. He’d be hard pressed to find a pupil in James’s massive irises.
“Not bad, eh?” James mumbled. “Gonna miss this. You having fun, Padfoot?”
“Oodles,” Sirius said, cuffing James on the ear. “Despite financing this whole merry affair.”
James sighed with relief and stretched. Sirius could hear his neck click gently as he did so - it had made that noise ever since James crash-landed during a Quidditch practice in fifth-year. Pomfrey had been perplexed beyond imagining when she was unable to fix it.
“Frank’ll have an epiphany in the morning and give it all to us out of the goodness of his heart,” James said, waving logistics away in his trademark style. “But you need to have an epiphany right now, Pads, or you’re going to carry your moody vibes into our fucking brilliant new lives, starting tomorrow.”
“S’cuse me?” Sirius blurted.
“You’re moody ‘cause you think all this Night Before malarkey means we’re splitting… but it’s like… we’re a tree. And we all stem from the same place. So even though we diverge, we’re all connected… in the great big Circle of life. Huh?”
“I haven’t had a lot of luck with trees,” Sirius pointed out. “I usually get blasted off them.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sirius did know what he meant. But James didn’t really get it. He wasn’t scared of losing the others, at least, not physically. But in few hours they’d all become just another group of boys from the Class of 1974, and they wouldn’t have any of this - dormitories, houses, cliques -to explain who they were to each other anymore. That would mean losing what made them them.
And Remus - he wanted Remus, he knew that, but not just for a night or a week or a couple of minutes or something, he wanted more than that. And he could sense that James and Peter and Frank were just waiting for them to cop off with each other tonight so they could have a cracking Night Before story and make obscene jokes and remember it constantly as they got older and greyer. But he didn’t want the sum of him and Remus’s… whatever to be a joke that was re-hashed on certain Friday nights down the pub. He only wanted Remus if it meant something, and so he couldn’t make a move.
“He fancies the arse off you, you know.”
Sirius suddenly felt the air in the room pressing down on him. He picked up the tangerine and took a bite from about four segments at once, not caring that the juice started to bleed between his fingers and onto the carpet.
“Fuck off, James,” he said, mouth full, smiling to show that he wasn’t angry, but clearly indicating with his body-language that he did not want to talk about it. Sadly, James either didn’t get or chose to ignore negative body-language, something that might, Sirius realised, have been the catalyst for his recent success with Evans. James leant closer, and in what he clearly thought was a whisper, but was about as sotto voce as a trumpeting elephant, said:
“Go for it.”
“Shut up.”
“Doooo it.”
“Do what?”
“You know what.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
James sat back triumphantly.
“You know what being in the same room as you two is like?” James leant forward again, this time to prise a slow-burning spliff from Frank’s unresisting fingers. “It’s like being stuck in the first four minutes of a really bad porn film.” He extracted the spliff, and then collapsed with chuckles.
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little bit funny,” James said. “Merlin - hand me that tangerine, will you? I’m starving.”
Sirius lobbed the near-demolished tangerine at James’s head, but James, his Quidditch reflexes miraculously still intact, managed to catch it one-handed. He hastily set about tearing off the last little island of peel and cramming the fruit into his mouth.
“And the best thing about doing it now,” James said, masticating at an alarming rate, “is that you can draw a fucking line under it once it’s done, you know? Like a line? In the sand. Get it out of your systems and go back to being normal friends again. I mean, after tomorrow, we’re all gonna move on.”
James swallowed his mouthful in one go.
“I mean, it’d be awful if you were using Moony or something,” he said kindly, toking on the spliff he’d spliff salvaged from Frank. “And I’d knock your block off if you did. But you both want to. And it’s perfect. I know how you hate stress. This couldn’t be simpler. No guilt, no consequences, just fun.”
Sirius took a deep breath. Yeah, he hated stress. Particularly when it came in the form of a fifth-year Ravenclaw girl he’d necked for about half-an-hour on a drunken whim and who had all-but stalked him for the last two weeks of term. But with Remus he wanted stress. He wanted stress, guilt, consequences, confusion, passion - the whole fucking rainbow of emotion and whatever pot of gold might lie at the end of it. If they got that far. But he didn’t want… lust and weed-dulled excitement. James cursed suddenly under his breath, startling Sirius out of his reverie. The spliff had reached its predictable conclusion and had burnt James’s fingertips. James put his fingers in his mouth and sucked them, before looking questioningly in his friend’s direction.
“You gonna go for it?”
Sirius opened his mouth, with no idea what was about to come out of it, and was saved by the sound of Peter and Remus coming back from the bathroom.
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REMUS
16-Aug-76
Remus Lupin was going to have sex with Sirius Black in next few hours.
This was a good idea.
A few hours ago James had tried to convince Remus, and following this, Remus had somehow managed to convince himself, that the two above statements were true. This, to a logical and ordered mind, would have seemed rather unlikely, but luckily, for the past two hours Remus's mind had been neither logical nor ordered. Now, the only coherent opinion that Remus could form about it (his brain having been fogged by this gloriously muggy marijuana-induced haze), was that if anyone was going to pop his cherry, it might as well be someone who knew him, properly, in the way you can only know someone when you’ve spent hours, days, weeks in their company, when you’ve slept less than three feet away from them for five years, when you’ve seen them grow from a bushy-tailed first-year into a fidgety boy-man into, well, whatever Remus was now.
It also didn’t hurt that Sirius had dived headfirst into the gene pool of good looks and been swallowed up by the waters with merely a ripple.
It probably hurt a little that Remus was in love with Sirius, but it was best not to dwell on that. Remus took the spliff from Peter and toked it, quelling the first glimmers of agitation and choosing drugged contentment instead.
Remus didn’t consider himself to be sentimental about losing his virginity - not that anyone who had heard James's horror story, could be, really. He didn’t expect firework displays and choking passion (or nosebleeds, come to that) but it didn't follow he was going to do it with just anyone. The person in question had to fill certain arbitrary criteria, such as having clean fingernails, smelling acceptable, having a nice back and being able to sit with Remus and not talk and this being alright, and not awkward at all. Other virtues counted for something, of course, and he didn't imagine he'd ever sleep with anyone who e.g. euthanised puppies, but these four were crucial. And in the absence of anyone who possessed all four, Remus had done stuff, but he hadn’t done It.
There had been a Ravenclaw Prefect called Edgar in the year above, who had taught him exciting things about ear-kissing, but he had been a Herbologist and his nails were always scuffed and dark with trapped dirt after an hour in the greenhouses. And most recently there had been Richards, a sixth-year Gryffindor who throughout their two week-long ‘relationship’ he’d never learnt the first-name of. Richards was suitably clean and good-looking would not shut up - apart from when Remus had found infinitely more interesting ways for him to use his mouth. Even if they weren’t viable contenders, and had both liked Remus far more than he liked them, they passed the time and took his mind off Sirius. Sirius’s clean fingernails and nice back were irrelevant, because Sirius a) was his best friend, and b) wasn’t gay.
Or at least, since the time when all the boys suddenly seemed to clock the fact that they had penises, Sirius had spent a lot of time being decidedly not-gay. There had been a multi-coloured parade of girls over the years, girls who wore their eyeliner smudged and their pleated skirts rolled up at the waist. And other girls who had bright pink nails and matching knickers. And even some girls with ponytails and airtex shirts and knee-high socks, who everyone knew, were the most discerning kind, mainly because they were (according to Kenneth)all closet lesbians.
Remus had found it difficult to feel properly jealous of these conquests - he could answer the inevitable ‘what has she got that I haven’t’ question quite easily and simply, and even he had to admit that breasts, while bouncy and a bit scary, were pretty fantastic things. Remus supposed that nothing he had to offer could compete with their innate entertainment value. When Sirius ever-so-occasionally dipped his toe into more male-oriented waters, however, the caustic feelings of low self-worth were harder to suppress.
One time, there had been a huge common-room game of Truth or Dare. Like all parlour games played en masse and sans alcohol, it was not brilliantly exciting. Spoilsports pretty soon began making conversation over the more boring truths, and refusing to do the more risqué dares. The game had been in danger of fizzling out altogether, when Peter, in a stroke of brilliance, had dared Imogen Dunfield to French-kiss Tracy Webdings for thirty seconds. This challenge was received with general jubilation by the male contingent of the room. Tracy, on the other hand, had been affronted rather than flattered. She said the dare was ‘exploitative’. Buzzwords like ‘exploitative’ were never far from anyone’s lips in the seventies, but they had to be treated gingerly, like unexploded bombs. Any kind of -ism was generally regarded as A Very Bad Thing, and if one of the big three (Sexism, Racism, Anarchism) was ever reported to a professor, detention and docked points would be the least of your worries.
Tracy was infamous for calling the administration's attention to such misdemeanours - a pinged bra strap in second-year had somehow been translated into 'indecent assualt'. Peter, powerless in the face of such militance, had been about to back down, when Sirius had stepped in suggested that he and Kenneth give it a go as well, so they too could be objectified. This the instant effect of causing twice as much uproar as the original challenge.
Presented with these new conditions, Trace had given reluctant agreement. Kenneth, on the other hand, had been not at all reluctant in giving his flat-out refusal. It was almost passed over, but there being roughly seven other boys in the game, for whom the thought of Imogen Dunfield in a lesbian clinch was nothing less than orgasmic, Kenneth got alternately bullied, bribed and blackmailed until twenty-seven minutes and as many Chinese burns later, he gave in.
Next morning, in the dormitory, James had asked Sirius why he'd picked on Kenneth, who had blushed so hard for the remainder of the evening that he could've gone to a Quidditch match and convincingly have been thought to be wearing supporters' face paints.
“Dunno,” Sirius had shrugged, as Remus dug deeper in his sock drawer, pretending that his choice of footwear was such a deeply important decision that the concentration required for the selection blocked out all surrounding noise. “I mean, I could've picked someone less... red.” A pause, during which Remus painstakingly examined some grey cotton ankle socks. “I just thought he was sweet, yeah?”
There were no clues in that cryptic comment as to why Remus didn’t ‘fit’, why Sirius hadn’t picked him, nothing.
Another time, Sirius had kissed a boy in front of Remus had been when they were in the Hog’s Head, the only place where James, the youngest and still legally underage, could buy rounds.. Beautiful people did not customarily frequent the Hog’s Head. The typical clientele usually resembled the furniture - creaky and suspicious-looking - but on this particular night, a scruffy Adonis walked in. Remus had learnt through skilful eavesdropping that he was visiting his aunt after a spell of rare potion trading in Zurich. As well as rough-looking boots, he had a rough Glaswegian accent and green eyes. It being absolutely impossible to even consider flirting when flanked by the rest of the Marauders, Remus had pushed the stranger out of his mind, only to be accosted by him when he went to buy the next round of drinks.
The stranger’s name turned out to Prentice (rather uninspiring, considering his looks, Remus thought) and he wondered if Remus’s dark friend was possibly interested in having a drink? Forcing himself not to point out that his “dark friend” was already doing just that, Remus brought the pints back to the table and stiffly relayed this message to the group. James had wolf-whistled raucously and Sirius had snorted into his cider, and Remus had felt temporarily relieved, if slightly mortified on behalf of Prentice.
About an hour later, Sirius had gone into the bogs ‘for a piss’ and spent an inordinately long time in them. James joked that he must be powdering his nose, and Remus, made incredibly dense by three pints of cider so far, had followed him in a few moments later. He’d shouldered the door open, almost stumbled, semi-tipsy, and then righted himself, only to see Prentice and Sirius in a stall that was very much occupied.
Remus hadn’t known what to do. It was late, his bladder felt like a lead balloon, and his brain wasn’t really keeping up its designated accompaniement in the crushingly awkward concerto his body was orchestrating. So he’d just stood at a urinal, had a piss, and left (after washing and drying his hands). There wasn’t anything else that he could have done, was there?
“You could have walked out again,” Peter had replied when Remus had told him, eyes wide and incredulous at Remus’s evident stupidity.
It hadn’t really occurred to Remus at the time.
“Did they stop when you came in?” Peter asked, as an afterthought.
No, they did not.
This incident had been painful at the time, in the way that a rusty nail being hammered into one’s chest is painful. But as time went by, and incidents like these were commonplace, the whole difficult business of being in love with Sirius and leading a normal life became quite similar to sleeping on an entire bed of rusty nails - the sources of pain were too minute, diverse and ultimately inconsequential to cause much discomfort. Unlike his leg. Remus frowned, and blinked back into the room. He had been sitting oddly as he reminisced, all his weight resting on his left leg. His leg had clearly decided that this meant it was undervalued, and as punishment, had fallen asleep.
Remus gave it a rough shake, then tried to do the same to himself mentally. The past didn't matter. All that mattered was this, this circle, and the Night Before, and - Sirius. Tonight. Brilliant.
It was getting late or, most probably, early. To Remus, in his not-entirely-lucid euphoria, the circle had the faltering, hesitant air of the last few strains of one of those wind-up music boxes with pirouetting dancers on the top. The tight coil of potential energy that had launched them at the start of the night seemed to have loosened. The rotations they were going through were still the same - a spliff was in circulation, one that Remus hadn’t made, so it must have been an authentic Longbottom creation - but although everyone participated in this languid pass-the-parcel, only James and Frank were partaking, both with eyes blissfully closed. Peter was, for some reason, mournfully gargling with his Firewhisky before he gulped it down. And Sirius… Remus made himself not look at him for a few moments - not because of embarrassment, which he thanked his lucky stars he didn’t feel at all - but because he wanted to prolong the last few seconds before he allowed himself to drink in how fucking amazing Sirius was.
Remus had always been famously good at self-denial. His mum called him ‘a little monk’ although the analogy would only have really worked if monks only carried out their vows of celibacy with the understanding that they would get drug-fuelled orgies once they finally got to heaven. Remus binged on pleasure - always abstaining from ‘jam today’ if there was the merest possibility of ‘unlimited marmalade stores’ tomorrow.
“Are you going to eat that ice-cream?” Peter would ask, watching Remus as he held his cone aloft, calmly watching the twin moons of vanilla without giving them so much as an investigatory lick.
“Yes,” Remus would reply, placid.
“Fine,” Peter would huff, wiping off the smear of his creamy moustache with his tongue. “But I hope it melts on you.”
Remus knew that nothing was more provoking than having just crunched down the waffley tip of your own ice-cream and then having to watch someone else eat theirs, but if he was honest with himself, it was partly why he did it. It meant that everything was set apart, special, his, and he didn't have to share the enjoyment with anyone.
It wasn't the same with Sirius, of course. Remus would obviously have much preferred it if he hadn't had to wait until the Night Before for everyone else to be done with him, before he could have a go. And he hadn't even been at all sure that his turn would ever come. Remus wouldn’t have been at all surprised if one day the chance to be with Sirius had simply evaporated - if after all that time of wanting and not-having, it had slowly vanished like a dollop of ice-cream melting into crumby dampness. But Remus looked at Sirius now - on their last night at Hogwarts - on this night that was the culmination of every Potions lesson and Quidditch practice and Hogsmeade trip - and he hadn’t evaporated. He was real, and here, and beautiful, poised and aristocratic and looking into his lap with that unconscious half-frown he had, the one that invariably made you feel both awestruck and inferior. And Remus, although he had the impression he was floating on a burgundy lagoon of carpet, was also real, and here, and even though he wasn’t poised or beautiful and felt, in fact, vaguely silly and graceless, James had said Sirius fancied him and that nugget of information was illuminating enough to blot out all his doubts and insecurity. It was time something happened. Even if the something only lasted a few hours and disappeared tomorrow with all the champagne and excitement, it was still more than he'd ever hoped for, and that made it worth it.
With a groan that sounded like the roots of a sturdy oak finally being wrenched out of the ground, Peter suddenly lurched onto all fours and began crawling drowsily towards bed. As he did so, the minutely co-ordinated balance of the circle seemed to be upset - James rolled onto his side and Frank pulled himself bodily into the armchair, knocking his cup and saucer over as he did so. The music-box rotation in Remus’s head clanged to a halt with the metallic notes of the teaspoon bashing china. And then, alltoofast there were just two of them. Sirius and Remus, sitting across from each other amongst piles of the night's debris.
This was it. This was the end. Everything was done, used-up, smoked… they’d come to the last squeeze of the toothpaste, the one before you discard the tube and buy a shiny new one. Carpe diem, Remus thought, head swimming. Seize the day, you stupid werewolf.
Remus suddenly noticed that Sirius’s lips were moving. He was so occupied with watching them move, that he failed to register whatever it was that Sirius actually said.
“What?” Remus asked. Hearing his own voice after so much silence felt weird. It sounded strange and throaty, and echoed in is ears - a bullfrog suddenly croaking out a question into the burgundy lagoon of the dorm.
“Are you tired?” Sirius asked. His voice sounded distorted as well, only his had far more musicality to it. It was richer and more resonant than normal. Remus shook his head. Too many thoughts.
“Just high.”
Sirius laughed quietly, a laugh that made Remus shiver deliciously. He sung something under his breath; a few lines from a song that Remus couldn't remember the name of, but knew the tune to. He joined in, humming the strains of bass guitar low in his throat, and then Sirius, a grateful smirk on his face, improvised the cymbals and drums with an empty bottle and his fingernails.
When they had both become too self-conscious to carry on, Remus sighed and shuffled closer.
"What's that song about, anyway?"
Sirius rolled his shoulders, looking distant.
“The usual. Love, chaos... taking acid.”
He fixed his eyes on Remus. Remus said nothing. He knew where they were now. They were treading water, hovering in the stillness before one of them either dived in, or backtracked, changed the subject, went to bed.
Then Sirius shook his head in a strange, perturbed way, as if he were frustrated with himself, opened his mouth, and Remus knew. He had to do it now, had to cut off whatever words were going to come out so that this could happen. And he knew that Sirius had paused just then to give him a chance to do just that. And if anything were to burst out from between Sirius's parted lips; the next few lines of the song, or a laugh, or a new topic of conversation, it would all be over. Two years of being in love - Remus wanted it to end on his terms.
He took the plunge.
At the same moment as Remus leant in, he acknowledged that there was no possible way he could stop now. He couldn't clamber back on the springboard and decide not to leap. This - was - happening. It felt like he was being towed inexorably along an invisible, miniature zip wire that spanned the distance between their two mouths, and mind was utterly blank - something new. No thoughts, no feelings, no inner mantra of oh holy crap - only the inevitable certainty that any moment now he was going to crash into Sirius's inscrutable, slate-grey gaze. The distance between him and it was shrinking. One hundred millimetres away... forty-seven millimetres... now twenty-three millimetres... thirteen... six...
Remus closed his eyes right before impact.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
END OF SECTION B
Please await results.
Apologies for extreme lateness.
Rating: R
Warnings: DRUG ABUSE.
Summary: A pop quiz in seventh-year R/S, seventies nostalgia, Frank Longbottom-as-a-pimp crack. Plus diagrams.
School's out for the summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces
- Alice Cooper
Don't worry about the future, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
-Baz Luhrmann
TIMED PAPER
Examiner’s note:
While SECTION A dealt with the theoretical and the speculatory, SECTION B will tackle the precise relationships between clearly defined bodies and candidates' ability to map them.
Please note that the extracts headed ‘THE CIRCLE’ and ‘SIRIUS’ took place late on Sunday, 15 August 1976.
The extract headed ‘REMUS’ took place early in the morning of Monday, 16 August 1976.
Results will be posted once the marks gained by candidates have been processed.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
SECTION B
1) Explain FL’s allegedly increasing circumference with reference to pie.
2) RL is travelling NE/E at хmph. RL is a negligible distance away from SB. SB is completely stationary. At what point will there be a collision?
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
THE CIRCLE
15-Aug-76
Remus is rolling a joint Frank is laughing with his head thrown back James is sloppily kissing Peter on the cheek who is resisting (barely) Sirius is peeling a tangerine.
The dormitory is like a collage of moving images pasted down haphazardly on the canvas of 20-20 vision; each blink reveals five scenes being acted out simultaneously. Eyelids flicker, then: Remus’s pointed tongue licking a Rizla; Frank stretching, strong arms arcing behind him in a huge semi-circle; James, using his wand to charm the cap off a bottle of Firewhisky; twin orange globes that seem to hang in mid-air as Sirius juggles the tangerines he inexplicably found under Peter’s bed. The room doesn’t just smell of weed - there is a distinct boy smell assualting everyone’s nostrils, and it’s reminiscent of bodily fluids, smoke, aftershave, crushed grass and baked bread. It’s not a pretty smell, quite strictly. But it’s comforting and familiar and almost intoxicating in itself. Everyone is talking at once and the sound washes over the room, each individual conversation as indistinguishable from the general sea of talk as each separate wave crashing onto a beach.
This is how it works.
Remus is one of the lucky ones, one of the accidental elite who managed to be labelled cool not through actually trying, more through happy accident. Remus smokes roll-ups as opposed to commercially made cigarettes because it’s cheaper - but this Knut-saving endeavour means he turned out to be the one best equipped to take on the ardous task of actually making the spliff. Frank can do it, of course, but ever the pragmatist, he’s uilitarian in his approach. Frank goes either for size or efficiency, because he figures that no matter how pretty a joint looks, it’s still only going to get smoked. Everyone else is shit at the ancient art of ‘making a zoot’ (James especially, whose infrequent attempts look like spring rolls from the dodgier Chinese takeaways).
Instead of a wand, Remus’s trusty silver lighter is used. It was discovered lying in some long grass on a third-year walk to Hogsmeade, and is the kind of lighter you pocket immediately, not even daring to look around for a possible owner. It absolutely never works before the third attempt, and has been known to stall until the attempts at ignition go into double figures.
The spliff lights. Remus tokes it, then Frank does, for considerably longer - he’s entitled. After having milked his toke for as long as decently possible, he passes it to Sirius with as much solemnity as if he’s handing over the Olympic torch.
Sirius tries to pass this flaming baton on to James immediately, but this is a foolhardy move. During a brief, vaguely homoerotic scuffle (instigated by possibly the two most staucnchly heterosexual boys in existence), James and Frank betweeen them succeed in getting the spliff between his lips. Sirius, with the resigned, pouting attitude of a toddler eating his final two sprouts, inhales, then exhales, blowing a smoke ring because he’s flash like that. James is sufficiently pleased. He claps Sirius on the back, closes his eyes and -
inhales. Notwithstanding how crap James is at the actual construction of spliff, he’s a dab hand at actually smoking it. One large breath in of acrid smoke, and then… nothing. For an irrationally long time. Peter takes the spliff from James while he sits there, chest puffed up like a robin’s. Appropriately, the scarlet Gryffindor crest is stitched above his left breast.
Peter smokes spliff in the same way he’s smoked everything the others have handed him since he was fourteeen - furtively, with much coughing, despite the fact that all he’s doing is sucking the smoke into his mouth and then choking it out. Remus takes pity and takes back the spliff, completing the circle, and a few seconds later, their leader exhales, not letting the balloons of his lungs whoosh out the smoke, but merely parting his lips and letting the grey wisps float up to the ceiling.
Each boy also has a beverage. Peter has downed most of his Firewhiskey, not having benefited from the weed (due to not actually inhaling), and, rather unwisely, James has matched him with his own bottle of Ogden’s, never one to be beaten at such an enjoyable game. Frank doesn’t drink alcohol (“It’s bad for you,” he had intoned calmly) and had sloped off to his room earlier to brew some Ginseng tea (referred to by Peter once Frank was out of earshot, as “boiled smugness”). Sirius is drinking the Firewhiskey too, of course, but at what seems to be a rather more considered pace - not that anyone can really see how much he’s drunk, due to the opaquish glass of the bottle. Remus hasn’t really had the opportunity to have too many swigs, as he’s been occupied with rolling, but he’s had first toke on the last four joints to go round the circle, and is beginning to act in a manner one might define as excessively happy.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
SIRIUS
15-Aug-76
James and Frank’s enthusiasm for getting Sirius to participate properly in the Night Before festivities had more or less petered out, and they were now having a conversation across him. Sirius didn’t mind this - he had a feeling that it was the alcohol and weed that were making him maudlin. Among other things.
“So this snake owled me a few weeks ago,” Frank began, daintily knocking ash into the china saucer which his teacup was resting in. First-year Sirius, hailing from The Noble (& Infallible) House of Black, had cottoned on slower than most to the fact that any generic Slytherin was customarily referred to in Gryffindor as a ‘snake’, this noun usually being preceded by ‘filthy’, ‘fucking’ or ‘dirty’. “Asked me if I was interested in expanding.”
“You arexpanding,” James slurred, beaming. His words kept speeding up and then reversing into each other like funfair dodgems. “Oryour waistline is. Musbee all those pastries you demolish when you get the munchies.”
“I mean expanding professionally,” Frank tranquilly replied, ignoring the dig and the sloppy pronunciation. “Wider markets. Moving away from Mary-Jane… introducing other girls into the family.”
“What girls?” James asked. It wasn’t yet clear if he fully got the metaphor, or if he really thought Frank was referring to adoptive sisters. Sirius rolled his eyes and tried to concentrate on shredding his tangerine. He was trying to do it so that the skin all came off in one long thin twist of peel, like a citrus-flavoured pencil-sharpening. But that required focus, and preferably a distinct lack of drunken best-friends in the immediate vicinity.
Instead of answering, Frank presented the spliff to Sirius, who managed to - successfully this time - deflect it onto James. James was past noticing Sirius declining to partake - past noticing anything much that wasn’t dead centre in his line of vision, and completely stationary, in fact.
“The usual suspects,” Frank said eventually. “Coco and Mandy.”
“Slags,” James said decisively.
“Coco’s pretty getting pretty big in London,” Frank said, nodding genially at Sirius, who was the only one in their immediate circle of friends who happened to live in the capital. James lived just outside it, in wholesome almost-suburbia, but it was Sirius who genuinely knew the city, who had been mugged at the tender age of nine (by a Muggle hoodie who thought his Galleons were chocolate coins and had to be subsequently rushed to a dentist), who had - due to light pollution - never actually seen the celestial body he was named after in the night sky until his first year at Hogwarts. Sirius, an authentic Londoner, was therefore expected by all of his peers to be a complete expert on all topics seedy, debauched and urban.
“Everything gets pretty big in London for a while,” Sirius volunteered. He was halfway through unwrapping his tangerine. The fist-sized ball of amber fruit peeked out if its casing, traced with white. “Then people get bored of it.”
James and Frank took a couple of seconds to digest this new piece of wisdom.
“And Lucy,” Frank finished, scratching the stubble on his chin. “Of In the Sky with Diamonds fame.”
Sirius looked across the circle at Peter and Remus. Peter was looking exceedingly grave, and Remus, ever the concerned best friend, was giving him reviving finger-snaps on the side of the head, and telling an endless stream of unanswered knock-knock jokes to take his mind off his churning stomach. Sirius considered, not for the first time, that maybe he wasn’t such a nice person. He loved Peter enormously - Pete was one of the three people he loved best in the whole fucking world, and yet he knew he could never bring himself to actually care about the fact that Pete was clearly about to have a pretty dire time upchucking his last three meals.
It wasn’t that Peter’s plight wasn’t interesting enough to hold his attention. (That being said, it had happened roughly every fortnight for the past five years, and it had been boring the first time.) The maddening thing about it was that each time Peter did throw up, he missed the white porcelain-ringed bullseye of the toilet bowl entirely, and found a new and inventive place to be sick. Some places were merely disgusting and inconvenient; for instance, the carpet or the bathtub. Others were nastier; a Quidditch boot, a shower cap, a newly-laundered pillowcase, Transfiguration coursework.
Sirius simply failed to see how anyone could muster sympathy for the perpetrator of such heinous crimes, but Remus, evidently, was in a more forgiving frame of mind. He was finding everything unaccounatably hilarious, and kept giving snuffled giggles (which he stifled by pressing his sleeve over his mouth) but he’d had enough compsure to do a self-regulated Irrigation Enchantment. A fine cooling mist sprayed out of the tip of his wand and onto Peter’s forehead. Peter seemed to be forgetting to blink, making him look both astonished and sweaty.
Then several things happened in quick succession. Remus glanced over his shoulder, and saw Sirius staring at him. At that moment, he must have tightened his grip on his wand, because the a jet of water spurted out of is end and hit Peter squarely in the eye. Peter roared with pain and started to staggering to his feet. James and Frank started ducking and dodging with gusto, both thinking that Peter was about to spew on top of them.
Sirius registered two things in the ensuing chaos - one, that Remus was no longer laughing, and that the eye-contact they had just had was hardly brief enough to be anything other than suggestive. He tugged unintentionally hard on the tangerine, agitated, and the peel tore in two. Sirius was consumed with an overwhelming sense of failure, although whether it was about Remus or the ripped tangerine twirl he didn’t know.
Remus, who had also stood up at this point, seemed to establish that Peter was indeed about to vomit, and ushered him in the direction of the bathroom with all the efficient urgency of a Healer rushing a pregnant woman into the delivery room. In a few seconds there were some horrible noises, that did actually sound a bit like something giving birth.
There was a disgusted pause, and then Frank, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened - which in fact was true, this was very much the norm - continued with his story.
“Obviously I wrote and told him where to get off,” Frank said, propping his chin up with his hand, and his elbow resting on knee. “I mean, that stuff isn’t safe. It’s not natural. Not like MJ. Just selling it’s dangerous, man.”
“How much?” James took off his glasses and commenced rubbing his face vigorously with his palms. The combined effect of drugs and alcohol was making him sleepy, Sirius could tell. “If you got into selling Lucy and Coco and stuff.”
Frank closed his eyes. James’s drowsiness was contagious.
“More than enough,” he said slowly. “Enough to pay my way through Auror training, enough to pay Alice’s training, enough to start the revolution. But it’s not worth it. What you have to understand… is that all those things… they’re part of the machine. They’re sad and angry… you take them on toiletseats before going back to the office to earn another thousand million Galleons for the Minister... you know?”
Frank seemed to be going off into a little reverie of his own, Sirius noticed. He glanced James, to see if he was also nearing unconsciousness. James, however, was clinging to lucidity, and grinned at Sirius when he caught his eye. Sirius couldn’t help but grin back. He’d be hard pressed to find a pupil in James’s massive irises.
“Not bad, eh?” James mumbled. “Gonna miss this. You having fun, Padfoot?”
“Oodles,” Sirius said, cuffing James on the ear. “Despite financing this whole merry affair.”
James sighed with relief and stretched. Sirius could hear his neck click gently as he did so - it had made that noise ever since James crash-landed during a Quidditch practice in fifth-year. Pomfrey had been perplexed beyond imagining when she was unable to fix it.
“Frank’ll have an epiphany in the morning and give it all to us out of the goodness of his heart,” James said, waving logistics away in his trademark style. “But you need to have an epiphany right now, Pads, or you’re going to carry your moody vibes into our fucking brilliant new lives, starting tomorrow.”
“S’cuse me?” Sirius blurted.
“You’re moody ‘cause you think all this Night Before malarkey means we’re splitting… but it’s like… we’re a tree. And we all stem from the same place. So even though we diverge, we’re all connected… in the great big Circle of life. Huh?”
“I haven’t had a lot of luck with trees,” Sirius pointed out. “I usually get blasted off them.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sirius did know what he meant. But James didn’t really get it. He wasn’t scared of losing the others, at least, not physically. But in few hours they’d all become just another group of boys from the Class of 1974, and they wouldn’t have any of this - dormitories, houses, cliques -to explain who they were to each other anymore. That would mean losing what made them them.
And Remus - he wanted Remus, he knew that, but not just for a night or a week or a couple of minutes or something, he wanted more than that. And he could sense that James and Peter and Frank were just waiting for them to cop off with each other tonight so they could have a cracking Night Before story and make obscene jokes and remember it constantly as they got older and greyer. But he didn’t want the sum of him and Remus’s… whatever to be a joke that was re-hashed on certain Friday nights down the pub. He only wanted Remus if it meant something, and so he couldn’t make a move.
“He fancies the arse off you, you know.”
Sirius suddenly felt the air in the room pressing down on him. He picked up the tangerine and took a bite from about four segments at once, not caring that the juice started to bleed between his fingers and onto the carpet.
“Fuck off, James,” he said, mouth full, smiling to show that he wasn’t angry, but clearly indicating with his body-language that he did not want to talk about it. Sadly, James either didn’t get or chose to ignore negative body-language, something that might, Sirius realised, have been the catalyst for his recent success with Evans. James leant closer, and in what he clearly thought was a whisper, but was about as sotto voce as a trumpeting elephant, said:
“Go for it.”
“Shut up.”
“Doooo it.”
“Do what?”
“You know what.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
James sat back triumphantly.
“You know what being in the same room as you two is like?” James leant forward again, this time to prise a slow-burning spliff from Frank’s unresisting fingers. “It’s like being stuck in the first four minutes of a really bad porn film.” He extracted the spliff, and then collapsed with chuckles.
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little bit funny,” James said. “Merlin - hand me that tangerine, will you? I’m starving.”
Sirius lobbed the near-demolished tangerine at James’s head, but James, his Quidditch reflexes miraculously still intact, managed to catch it one-handed. He hastily set about tearing off the last little island of peel and cramming the fruit into his mouth.
“And the best thing about doing it now,” James said, masticating at an alarming rate, “is that you can draw a fucking line under it once it’s done, you know? Like a line? In the sand. Get it out of your systems and go back to being normal friends again. I mean, after tomorrow, we’re all gonna move on.”
James swallowed his mouthful in one go.
“I mean, it’d be awful if you were using Moony or something,” he said kindly, toking on the spliff he’d spliff salvaged from Frank. “And I’d knock your block off if you did. But you both want to. And it’s perfect. I know how you hate stress. This couldn’t be simpler. No guilt, no consequences, just fun.”
Sirius took a deep breath. Yeah, he hated stress. Particularly when it came in the form of a fifth-year Ravenclaw girl he’d necked for about half-an-hour on a drunken whim and who had all-but stalked him for the last two weeks of term. But with Remus he wanted stress. He wanted stress, guilt, consequences, confusion, passion - the whole fucking rainbow of emotion and whatever pot of gold might lie at the end of it. If they got that far. But he didn’t want… lust and weed-dulled excitement. James cursed suddenly under his breath, startling Sirius out of his reverie. The spliff had reached its predictable conclusion and had burnt James’s fingertips. James put his fingers in his mouth and sucked them, before looking questioningly in his friend’s direction.
“You gonna go for it?”
Sirius opened his mouth, with no idea what was about to come out of it, and was saved by the sound of Peter and Remus coming back from the bathroom.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
REMUS
16-Aug-76
Remus Lupin was going to have sex with Sirius Black in next few hours.
This was a good idea.
A few hours ago James had tried to convince Remus, and following this, Remus had somehow managed to convince himself, that the two above statements were true. This, to a logical and ordered mind, would have seemed rather unlikely, but luckily, for the past two hours Remus's mind had been neither logical nor ordered. Now, the only coherent opinion that Remus could form about it (his brain having been fogged by this gloriously muggy marijuana-induced haze), was that if anyone was going to pop his cherry, it might as well be someone who knew him, properly, in the way you can only know someone when you’ve spent hours, days, weeks in their company, when you’ve slept less than three feet away from them for five years, when you’ve seen them grow from a bushy-tailed first-year into a fidgety boy-man into, well, whatever Remus was now.
It also didn’t hurt that Sirius had dived headfirst into the gene pool of good looks and been swallowed up by the waters with merely a ripple.
It probably hurt a little that Remus was in love with Sirius, but it was best not to dwell on that. Remus took the spliff from Peter and toked it, quelling the first glimmers of agitation and choosing drugged contentment instead.
Remus didn’t consider himself to be sentimental about losing his virginity - not that anyone who had heard James's horror story, could be, really. He didn’t expect firework displays and choking passion (or nosebleeds, come to that) but it didn't follow he was going to do it with just anyone. The person in question had to fill certain arbitrary criteria, such as having clean fingernails, smelling acceptable, having a nice back and being able to sit with Remus and not talk and this being alright, and not awkward at all. Other virtues counted for something, of course, and he didn't imagine he'd ever sleep with anyone who e.g. euthanised puppies, but these four were crucial. And in the absence of anyone who possessed all four, Remus had done stuff, but he hadn’t done It.
There had been a Ravenclaw Prefect called Edgar in the year above, who had taught him exciting things about ear-kissing, but he had been a Herbologist and his nails were always scuffed and dark with trapped dirt after an hour in the greenhouses. And most recently there had been Richards, a sixth-year Gryffindor who throughout their two week-long ‘relationship’ he’d never learnt the first-name of. Richards was suitably clean and good-looking would not shut up - apart from when Remus had found infinitely more interesting ways for him to use his mouth. Even if they weren’t viable contenders, and had both liked Remus far more than he liked them, they passed the time and took his mind off Sirius. Sirius’s clean fingernails and nice back were irrelevant, because Sirius a) was his best friend, and b) wasn’t gay.
Or at least, since the time when all the boys suddenly seemed to clock the fact that they had penises, Sirius had spent a lot of time being decidedly not-gay. There had been a multi-coloured parade of girls over the years, girls who wore their eyeliner smudged and their pleated skirts rolled up at the waist. And other girls who had bright pink nails and matching knickers. And even some girls with ponytails and airtex shirts and knee-high socks, who everyone knew, were the most discerning kind, mainly because they were (according to Kenneth)all closet lesbians.
Remus had found it difficult to feel properly jealous of these conquests - he could answer the inevitable ‘what has she got that I haven’t’ question quite easily and simply, and even he had to admit that breasts, while bouncy and a bit scary, were pretty fantastic things. Remus supposed that nothing he had to offer could compete with their innate entertainment value. When Sirius ever-so-occasionally dipped his toe into more male-oriented waters, however, the caustic feelings of low self-worth were harder to suppress.
One time, there had been a huge common-room game of Truth or Dare. Like all parlour games played en masse and sans alcohol, it was not brilliantly exciting. Spoilsports pretty soon began making conversation over the more boring truths, and refusing to do the more risqué dares. The game had been in danger of fizzling out altogether, when Peter, in a stroke of brilliance, had dared Imogen Dunfield to French-kiss Tracy Webdings for thirty seconds. This challenge was received with general jubilation by the male contingent of the room. Tracy, on the other hand, had been affronted rather than flattered. She said the dare was ‘exploitative’. Buzzwords like ‘exploitative’ were never far from anyone’s lips in the seventies, but they had to be treated gingerly, like unexploded bombs. Any kind of -ism was generally regarded as A Very Bad Thing, and if one of the big three (Sexism, Racism, Anarchism) was ever reported to a professor, detention and docked points would be the least of your worries.
Tracy was infamous for calling the administration's attention to such misdemeanours - a pinged bra strap in second-year had somehow been translated into 'indecent assualt'. Peter, powerless in the face of such militance, had been about to back down, when Sirius had stepped in suggested that he and Kenneth give it a go as well, so they too could be objectified. This the instant effect of causing twice as much uproar as the original challenge.
Presented with these new conditions, Trace had given reluctant agreement. Kenneth, on the other hand, had been not at all reluctant in giving his flat-out refusal. It was almost passed over, but there being roughly seven other boys in the game, for whom the thought of Imogen Dunfield in a lesbian clinch was nothing less than orgasmic, Kenneth got alternately bullied, bribed and blackmailed until twenty-seven minutes and as many Chinese burns later, he gave in.
Next morning, in the dormitory, James had asked Sirius why he'd picked on Kenneth, who had blushed so hard for the remainder of the evening that he could've gone to a Quidditch match and convincingly have been thought to be wearing supporters' face paints.
“Dunno,” Sirius had shrugged, as Remus dug deeper in his sock drawer, pretending that his choice of footwear was such a deeply important decision that the concentration required for the selection blocked out all surrounding noise. “I mean, I could've picked someone less... red.” A pause, during which Remus painstakingly examined some grey cotton ankle socks. “I just thought he was sweet, yeah?”
There were no clues in that cryptic comment as to why Remus didn’t ‘fit’, why Sirius hadn’t picked him, nothing.
Another time, Sirius had kissed a boy in front of Remus had been when they were in the Hog’s Head, the only place where James, the youngest and still legally underage, could buy rounds.. Beautiful people did not customarily frequent the Hog’s Head. The typical clientele usually resembled the furniture - creaky and suspicious-looking - but on this particular night, a scruffy Adonis walked in. Remus had learnt through skilful eavesdropping that he was visiting his aunt after a spell of rare potion trading in Zurich. As well as rough-looking boots, he had a rough Glaswegian accent and green eyes. It being absolutely impossible to even consider flirting when flanked by the rest of the Marauders, Remus had pushed the stranger out of his mind, only to be accosted by him when he went to buy the next round of drinks.
The stranger’s name turned out to Prentice (rather uninspiring, considering his looks, Remus thought) and he wondered if Remus’s dark friend was possibly interested in having a drink? Forcing himself not to point out that his “dark friend” was already doing just that, Remus brought the pints back to the table and stiffly relayed this message to the group. James had wolf-whistled raucously and Sirius had snorted into his cider, and Remus had felt temporarily relieved, if slightly mortified on behalf of Prentice.
About an hour later, Sirius had gone into the bogs ‘for a piss’ and spent an inordinately long time in them. James joked that he must be powdering his nose, and Remus, made incredibly dense by three pints of cider so far, had followed him in a few moments later. He’d shouldered the door open, almost stumbled, semi-tipsy, and then righted himself, only to see Prentice and Sirius in a stall that was very much occupied.
Remus hadn’t known what to do. It was late, his bladder felt like a lead balloon, and his brain wasn’t really keeping up its designated accompaniement in the crushingly awkward concerto his body was orchestrating. So he’d just stood at a urinal, had a piss, and left (after washing and drying his hands). There wasn’t anything else that he could have done, was there?
“You could have walked out again,” Peter had replied when Remus had told him, eyes wide and incredulous at Remus’s evident stupidity.
It hadn’t really occurred to Remus at the time.
“Did they stop when you came in?” Peter asked, as an afterthought.
No, they did not.
This incident had been painful at the time, in the way that a rusty nail being hammered into one’s chest is painful. But as time went by, and incidents like these were commonplace, the whole difficult business of being in love with Sirius and leading a normal life became quite similar to sleeping on an entire bed of rusty nails - the sources of pain were too minute, diverse and ultimately inconsequential to cause much discomfort. Unlike his leg. Remus frowned, and blinked back into the room. He had been sitting oddly as he reminisced, all his weight resting on his left leg. His leg had clearly decided that this meant it was undervalued, and as punishment, had fallen asleep.
Remus gave it a rough shake, then tried to do the same to himself mentally. The past didn't matter. All that mattered was this, this circle, and the Night Before, and - Sirius. Tonight. Brilliant.
It was getting late or, most probably, early. To Remus, in his not-entirely-lucid euphoria, the circle had the faltering, hesitant air of the last few strains of one of those wind-up music boxes with pirouetting dancers on the top. The tight coil of potential energy that had launched them at the start of the night seemed to have loosened. The rotations they were going through were still the same - a spliff was in circulation, one that Remus hadn’t made, so it must have been an authentic Longbottom creation - but although everyone participated in this languid pass-the-parcel, only James and Frank were partaking, both with eyes blissfully closed. Peter was, for some reason, mournfully gargling with his Firewhisky before he gulped it down. And Sirius… Remus made himself not look at him for a few moments - not because of embarrassment, which he thanked his lucky stars he didn’t feel at all - but because he wanted to prolong the last few seconds before he allowed himself to drink in how fucking amazing Sirius was.
Remus had always been famously good at self-denial. His mum called him ‘a little monk’ although the analogy would only have really worked if monks only carried out their vows of celibacy with the understanding that they would get drug-fuelled orgies once they finally got to heaven. Remus binged on pleasure - always abstaining from ‘jam today’ if there was the merest possibility of ‘unlimited marmalade stores’ tomorrow.
“Are you going to eat that ice-cream?” Peter would ask, watching Remus as he held his cone aloft, calmly watching the twin moons of vanilla without giving them so much as an investigatory lick.
“Yes,” Remus would reply, placid.
“Fine,” Peter would huff, wiping off the smear of his creamy moustache with his tongue. “But I hope it melts on you.”
Remus knew that nothing was more provoking than having just crunched down the waffley tip of your own ice-cream and then having to watch someone else eat theirs, but if he was honest with himself, it was partly why he did it. It meant that everything was set apart, special, his, and he didn't have to share the enjoyment with anyone.
It wasn't the same with Sirius, of course. Remus would obviously have much preferred it if he hadn't had to wait until the Night Before for everyone else to be done with him, before he could have a go. And he hadn't even been at all sure that his turn would ever come. Remus wouldn’t have been at all surprised if one day the chance to be with Sirius had simply evaporated - if after all that time of wanting and not-having, it had slowly vanished like a dollop of ice-cream melting into crumby dampness. But Remus looked at Sirius now - on their last night at Hogwarts - on this night that was the culmination of every Potions lesson and Quidditch practice and Hogsmeade trip - and he hadn’t evaporated. He was real, and here, and beautiful, poised and aristocratic and looking into his lap with that unconscious half-frown he had, the one that invariably made you feel both awestruck and inferior. And Remus, although he had the impression he was floating on a burgundy lagoon of carpet, was also real, and here, and even though he wasn’t poised or beautiful and felt, in fact, vaguely silly and graceless, James had said Sirius fancied him and that nugget of information was illuminating enough to blot out all his doubts and insecurity. It was time something happened. Even if the something only lasted a few hours and disappeared tomorrow with all the champagne and excitement, it was still more than he'd ever hoped for, and that made it worth it.
With a groan that sounded like the roots of a sturdy oak finally being wrenched out of the ground, Peter suddenly lurched onto all fours and began crawling drowsily towards bed. As he did so, the minutely co-ordinated balance of the circle seemed to be upset - James rolled onto his side and Frank pulled himself bodily into the armchair, knocking his cup and saucer over as he did so. The music-box rotation in Remus’s head clanged to a halt with the metallic notes of the teaspoon bashing china. And then, alltoofast there were just two of them. Sirius and Remus, sitting across from each other amongst piles of the night's debris.
This was it. This was the end. Everything was done, used-up, smoked… they’d come to the last squeeze of the toothpaste, the one before you discard the tube and buy a shiny new one. Carpe diem, Remus thought, head swimming. Seize the day, you stupid werewolf.
Remus suddenly noticed that Sirius’s lips were moving. He was so occupied with watching them move, that he failed to register whatever it was that Sirius actually said.
“What?” Remus asked. Hearing his own voice after so much silence felt weird. It sounded strange and throaty, and echoed in is ears - a bullfrog suddenly croaking out a question into the burgundy lagoon of the dorm.
“Are you tired?” Sirius asked. His voice sounded distorted as well, only his had far more musicality to it. It was richer and more resonant than normal. Remus shook his head. Too many thoughts.
“Just high.”
Sirius laughed quietly, a laugh that made Remus shiver deliciously. He sung something under his breath; a few lines from a song that Remus couldn't remember the name of, but knew the tune to. He joined in, humming the strains of bass guitar low in his throat, and then Sirius, a grateful smirk on his face, improvised the cymbals and drums with an empty bottle and his fingernails.
When they had both become too self-conscious to carry on, Remus sighed and shuffled closer.
"What's that song about, anyway?"
Sirius rolled his shoulders, looking distant.
“The usual. Love, chaos... taking acid.”
He fixed his eyes on Remus. Remus said nothing. He knew where they were now. They were treading water, hovering in the stillness before one of them either dived in, or backtracked, changed the subject, went to bed.
Then Sirius shook his head in a strange, perturbed way, as if he were frustrated with himself, opened his mouth, and Remus knew. He had to do it now, had to cut off whatever words were going to come out so that this could happen. And he knew that Sirius had paused just then to give him a chance to do just that. And if anything were to burst out from between Sirius's parted lips; the next few lines of the song, or a laugh, or a new topic of conversation, it would all be over. Two years of being in love - Remus wanted it to end on his terms.
He took the plunge.
At the same moment as Remus leant in, he acknowledged that there was no possible way he could stop now. He couldn't clamber back on the springboard and decide not to leap. This - was - happening. It felt like he was being towed inexorably along an invisible, miniature zip wire that spanned the distance between their two mouths, and mind was utterly blank - something new. No thoughts, no feelings, no inner mantra of oh holy crap - only the inevitable certainty that any moment now he was going to crash into Sirius's inscrutable, slate-grey gaze. The distance between him and it was shrinking. One hundred millimetres away... forty-seven millimetres... now twenty-three millimetres... thirteen... six...
Remus closed his eyes right before impact.
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END OF SECTION B
Please await results.
Apologies for extreme lateness.